It is 1979. The author travels (and takes the reader) by rail, boat, bus, rental car, bicycle, and Shanks's pony up the East Coast from Washington to Maine, "going from here to there, to see" what in thirty years has changed in the land, the landscape, the society. He reflects on history, he dreams, he digresses untethered and, "perhaps to delay" his own painful progress, he interpolates passages from the high-satirical Caldoon Wars, chronicle of Operation Mollycoddle, a U.S. military action to rein in a secessionist Maine and, as though in passing, to destroy Caldoon himself. The passing of another thirty years has not dulled the author's critical vision. After all, we still confront " ... a future without freedom ... where the repressed seek more repression ... a direct route to torture chambers and random terror, the return of religion, barbarity..."
In this book, the author combines a vast array of scholarship on supposedly discrete episodes in American history into a story of same-sex desire across the country and the centuries.
E. H. Gombrich's Little History of the World, though written in 1935, has become one of the treasures of historical writing since its first publication in English in 2005. The Yale edition alone has now sold over half a million copies, and the book is available worldwide in almost thirty languages. Gombrich was of course the best-known art historian of his time, and his text suggests illustrations on every page. This illustrated edition of the Little History brings together the pellucid humanity of his narrative with the images that may well have been in his mind's eye as he wrote the book. The two hundred illustrations—most of them in full color—are not simple embellishments, though they are beautiful. They emerge from the text, enrich the author's intention, and deepen the pleasure of reading this remarkable work. For this edition the text is reset in a spacious format, flowing around illustrations that range from paintings to line drawings, emblems, motifs, and symbols. The book incorporates freshly drawn maps, a revised preface, and a new index. Blending high-grade design, fine paper, and classic binding, this is both a sumptuous gift book and an enhanced edition of a timeless account of human history.
Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.
A Short History of Relations Between Peoples traces how the cultural attitudes that different peoples and nations had toward each other have undergone a profound and positive change during the last 500 years. For most of recorded history, neighboring countries, tribes, and peoples everywhere in the world regarded each other with apprehension—when not outright fear and loathing. Tribal or racial attitudes were virtually universal, no one group being much better or worse in this respect than any other—and for good reason given the conditions of life before the modern era. But in the last 500 years, relations between different peoples have undergone a slow but profound change. In this book, John Ellis explains how a confluence of discoveries, inventions, explorations, as well as social and political changes gave birth to a new attitude, one expressed succinctly in the Latin phrase: gens una sumus—we are all one people. This sentiment has by now become a modern orthodoxy, however inconsistently or even hypocritically it may sometimes be espoused. Ellis tells the story of how the transition happened, setting out the crucial stages in its progress as well as the key events that moved it forward, and identifying the individuals and groups that brought about the eventual dominance of this new outlook. This is a compelling story in its own right, but it is also a useful inoculation against the destructive ideas of today’s race hustlers. An accurate grasp of how this crucial change happened contradicts everything that they want us to believe. Ideologies such as Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion have everything touching on race and racism completely backwards. The villains of their ignorant version of history are really the heroes. In explaining how the historical record makes nonsense of CRT, Ellis’s book amounts to the most fundamental and complete refutation of that pernicious ideology.
What does it mean to call Western society 'secular'? What is 'secularism'? And how should we understand the concept of 'secularism' in international relations, particularly the clash between radical Islam and the West? The Latin term from which the word 'secular' is derived - 'saeculum' - means 'generation' or 'age', and came to mean that which belongs to this life, to the here and now, in this world. It is widely used as a shorthand for the ideology which shapes contemporary society without reference to the divine.However, according to Graeme Smith, 'secularism' represents a great deal more. He offers a radical reappraisal of the notion of secularism and its history, beginning with the Greeks and proceeding to modernity and the contemporary period. The assumption that the West is becoming increasingly secular is often unquestioned. By contrast, Dr Smith discerns a different kind of society: one informed by a historical legacy which makes sense only when it is appreciated that it is religious. Secularism was born of Christianity. Daringly - and very originally - Smith argues that it is impossible to understand the idea of the secular without appreciating that, at root, it is Christian. "A Short History of Secularism" will fundamentally reshape discussions of western culture, religion and politics. It will have strong appeal to students of religion, political philosophy, and the history of ideas.
This complete revision and updating of Professor Robins' classic text offers a comprehensive account of the history of linguistic thought from its European origins some 2500 years ago to the present day. It examines the independent development of linguistic science in China and Medieval Islam, and especially in India, which was to have a profound effect on European and American linguistics from the end of the eighteenth century. The fourth edition of A Short History of Linguistics gives a greater prominence to the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, because of the lasting importance of his work on language in relation to general eighteenth century thinking and of its perceived relevance in the latter half of the twentieth century to several aspects of generative grammatical theory. The final section, covering the twentieth century, has been rewritten and divided into two new chapters, so as to deal effectively with the increasingly divergent development of descriptive and theoretical linguistics that took place in the latter half of this century. Readable and authoritative, Professor Robins' introduction provides a clear and up-to-date overview of all the major issues in the light of contemporary scholarly debate, and will be essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics alike.
